Being as honest to your partner as you think you are to yourself may feel like the right pathway to take to ensure your relationship remains solid. After all, you’ve been told for as long as you can remember that you need to tell the truth at all times. However, how closely do you stick to this value? When was the last time you slid across that pathway as you held back on expressing your true feelings? How about another time when you blurted out the truth, only to lead to trouble?
Maybe it's time to take another look at this honesty-is-the-best-policy approach. You can get some hints from a newly published paper by the University of Rochester’s Bonnie Le and colleagues (2022). In their work, they weigh the costs vs. benefits of honesty’s effects on personal well-being, but the findings have clear implications for your closest relationship.
Honesty and Personal Well-Being
When it comes to well-being, there are definite benefits to honesty; as the authors noted, “honest individuals tend to have stronger intrinsic aspirations including self-acceptance, affiliation, and communal feelings relative to those who are less honest” (p. 2). Defining honesty simply as “expressing one’s truthful thoughts and feelings and ensuring these truths are effectively communicated” (p. 1), the authors identified people who are truthful as those who keep their promises, stay away from distorting the facts, and, importantly, don’t lie. Inherent in this definition of honesty is the idea that it is a social quality. Honesty does not occur in a vacuum, in other words. It affects the very foundation of many relationships.
As you think about whether you measure up to this set of criteria in your dealings with your partner, ask yourself further how being honest can make you not just a “better person” but also one who feels better about yourself. Does it give you the pride to count yourself as someone who can be counted on? The U of R led researchers suggest that being honest not only gives you a cleaner conscience but it can promote a set of health benefits such as lower cancer risk and even fewer problems in mobility across the years of adulthood. These findings imply that being honest can, over the long run, improve the quality of your life independently of how it affects your relationship.
Why would honesty matter so much as a health-promoting strategy? Previous research that Le et al. cited suggested that honest people are less likely to engage in problematic health behaviors such as abusing substances. Maybe, furthermore, they won’t lie to themselves (or their loved ones) about how often they exercise or eat foods low in carbs, fats, and sodium.
Psychologically, in addition, people who are honest seem to have lower reactivity to stress. Perhaps they are able to draw on their inner resources, look truthfully at their ability to handle life’s challenges, and use more successful coping methods.
When Honesty Works Against Your Well-Being
Even in their listing of honesty’s benefits, Le et al. also included a few qualifications. Honesty may not always feel good in the moment. Perhaps your healthcare professional has recommended that you keep track of your carb intake. Things are going pretty well for a few days, but then you attend a party where you sneak in a few extra slices of chocolate cake. You’d rather not include this in your daily intake diary, but, painfully, you add it anyway.
These little incidences of having the truth hurt shouldn’t matter over time, as Le and her fellow authors suggested. You’ll still be able to promote “meaning and virtue rather than personal pleasure” (p. 2).
Situations in which the social side of honesty is put to the test present a very different set of issues. Being forthright can go a long way toward getting people to like you better and make you a more valued member of your workplace or other organizations. Clearly, your partner would fall in the category of people who would probably prefer that they can count on you not to lie. But these same individuals, including your partner, may not like it if your honesty casts them in a negative light.
Now we get to the downside of honesty to well-being. In the words of Le and her fellow authors, “While honestly sharing information may at times foster closeness, disclosing truthful information can also be difficult, stressful, or induce negative feelings” (p 3).
Perhaps you have a newly-acquired family member, such as a cousin-in-law, whose intrusive questioning of you and your decisions is making it hard for you to tolerate being in the same room together. You can’t even avoid this person by staying away because you’re on a group text with them that also contains their rather inappropriate lines of questioning. Do you tell this person how you feel? Do you just leave the group chat?
As you weigh the pros and cons of expressing your honest feelings, you can see exactly how the social context of honesty can create ambiguities. Even more to the point, when your partner realizes that you're pulling away from their favorite cousin, hurt feelings can most definitely ensue.
Another downside to honesty involves deciding what to disclose and not to disclose about yourself to others. You might shave off a few dollars from the price of a recent impulse purchase when your partner notices that you’re sporting a luxury tote bag. However, would this be considered an act of deceit by your partner and, therefore, a threat to your relationship?
Excuses present ample opportunities for tests of your honesty with their own potential drawbacks. You can out and out make up an imaginary appointment that would prevent you from having to see that nosy in-law of yours when they suggest getting together for lunch. At work, you could similarly engage in any number of reasons to avoid taking on additional duties that just don’t interest you that much, especially if they’re not essential to your job evaluations. However, as you do so, apart from possible social costs (such as being found to have lied), you are potentially also eroding your own feelings of satisfaction with your view of yourself as a trustworthy person.
Honesty can also hurt you when, in your desire to be truthful, you reveal something that could put someone else inadvertently at risk. Le and her fellow authors noted the problems that whistleblowers can run into, such as backlash from those they report on and even perhaps future employers who worry that the individual can’t be trusted with company secrets.
Although not whistleblowing per se, you could also create interpersonal strains if you reveal a secret that someone shared with you. This could happen inadvertently, such as telling the partner of one member of a couple that the other is planning a surprise anniversary trip. You might also feel burdened by a friend’s revelation about a potentially abusive partner, which leads you to worry that your friend could be in danger.
To Be or Not to Be Honest: The Final Verdict
On the whole, Le and her colleagues maintained that it is still better to be honest than to be deceitful in terms of preserving your own health, physical and mental, across your lifetime. Honesty’s potential drawbacks, they maintained, can be buffered by adopting the right communication strategies.
Most importantly, when you feel that you must be honest, say whatever you need to say in as sensitively and benevolently a way as possible. Ironically, using the expression “to be honest…” therefore may not be an ideal prelude before revealing a truth. In part, this is because the expression has become so overused, but also it signals to the recipient that something bad is about to be said.
Instead of hedging with such banal expressions, try cushioning the blow by making the observation an “I” statement. You could let that annoying in-law know that when they ask you so many personal questions, it makes you feel uncomfortable. Doing so when your temperature has cooled off a bit from the latest incident can further ensure that the message will be received not as an attack but as an attempt to promote harmony. When it comes to confessing the truth to your partner about the cost of your extravagant purchase, be sure to pair this admission up with a promise (an honest one) that you will hold off the next time and check with them first.
To sum up, returning to the idea that honesty has its costs, the U of R led study provides concrete suggestions for reducing the costs and maximizing the gains. Optimistically, the study authors also go beyond the realm of close relationships to the larger society as a whole. As they observed, just as lies can quickly spread among social groups, so can the value of honesty.
Their work suggests that using honesty to your advantage will benefit your own fulfillment, but showing others its values, may also “kindle” an “honesty contagion” that can benefit all.
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Honesty in Your Relationship Isn't Always the Best Policy - Psychology Today
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